Hearing devices, such as earphones and headsets, are today in widespread use for various purposes such as music listening, telephony, hearing protection and hearing enhancement. Today it is also common to wear hearing devices for listening to music while on the move, for example when out running, commuting with bicycle, walking the dog, etc. There are several inconveniences associated with the use of a hearing device, especially when used in environment with varying background noise.
A known solution to this problem is to use hearing devices with adaptive gain control for audio reproduction, compression, masking and noise reduction to reduce or block out background sounds or noise. A disadvantage of these solutions when used in hearing devices is that while wearing such a hearing device, the surrounding sounds are blocked out and in some situations this is unwanted. It can even be dangerous; it could for example prevent a user from hearing a car coming from behind.
Hence, the security level on the hearing devices of today does not fulfill all requirements.